With an ever-increasing data and information on the Internet, finding relevant information has become a daunting task. To add to this, the enthusiasm of people to capture every moment of their lives and upload the same on social media networks has made this web of information even more tangled and complex. Constant updating of status, images, locations, activities etc. provides the millions of social media users an opportunity to showcase the social and other aspect of their lives. Amidst this social networking frenzy, a trend that has caught the fancy of users is that of tagging their pictures, data, location and other information to ensure that their data becomes a part of a specific theme based pool of information that can be easily showcased or retrieved at a later time by using the specific tags. One such common tagging mechanism is adding ‘Hashtags’ to any data uploaded on social media.
A hashtag may be a metadata tag or label added to any data posted on social media networks to ensure that users searching for information related to a specific theme or field easily find the data. For example, the hashtag “#YummyItalian” added to a picture of friends at an Italian restaurant showcases visit to an Italian restaurant and the friends' view that the food at the restaurant is great! All that a user needs in order to promptly upload data on social media platforms is a user device such as a smart phone, tablet etc. and a wireless access device such as a wireless router that enables the user device to wirelessly connect to the Internet. Widespread usage of wireless access devices at public and commercial places has become a boon for social networking users to constantly post and tag data on social networking platforms.
Though a great way to sort and access data posted on social media, hashtags and other tagging mechanisms have also resulted in a lot of wrong and redundant categorization of social media data. This is because either user do not know the correct manner of tagging social media data posted by them or lot of non-uniform and random tags are used. For example, for photographs of two different groups of friends dining at the same restaurant, one photograph is tagged “#YummyItalian” while the other is tagged “#AwesomeFood”. Now a user looking for good Italian food online will be able to access the first photograph but not the second due to usage of an overly generic tag. Moreover, in both the instances, the restaurant owner does not benefit in any way as the restaurant is not identified in any of the tags and the owner has to rely on the users' discretion of disclosing the location of dining or the name of the restaurant.